Crime Time

Thursday, February 21, 2019

Dolphins,
Daytona, Glades, and Gators notwithstanding, Florida has never held
much attraction for me. Not sure why. Been down there a few times, to
the races, to visit friends. No bad memories—I actually kind of
liked the place. I've enjoyed reading about it—MacDonald, Hiaasen,
Hollandcome
to mind—but when I'm not actually there I
feel
no chemistry, no pheromones
pulling me south. Not like Callifornia, which I visited once long ago
and still carry in my heart.

Maybe
it has something to do with my mother and the oranges. She complained
that Florida oranges were more acidic than California oranges. I
never noticed any difference, but I'm
learning more and more
Gert's influence went
deep. Not that I look at the labels. She didn't go that
deep. I can't help but wonder, tho, if maybe her orange bias didn't
somehow affect my nonchalance toward Charles Willeford.
It's a stretch, I know, especially considering all of the positives.

Despite
enthusiastic endorsements from a couple of crime authors whose blogs
I followed—Ed Gorman and Bill Crider—I never had quite enuf itch
to read Willeford.
It took another crime author, Ben Boulden of
Gravetapping,
to lead
me into Willeford's world. Bouldenpostedalink
on
Facebook thattook
me to the
gate,
a long Daily
Beast piece
on Willeford, with this headline:The
Train-Hopping, Nazi-Fighting Literary Hero You’ve Never Heard Of.

Resist a pitch like that?
Hell, I read a few paragraphs and suddenly my fingers dashed off to the Kindle library and with no more thought than it takes to breathe downloaded Willeford's first novel, Miami
Blues,
which
is also the first in his four-book series featuring Detective Hoke
Moseley. I will read the rest, if my doctor allows me to do that much
laughing and experience that much suspense. I shook my apartment's
flimsy walls laughing at the opening scene, perhaps echoing
Willeford's own laughter when he described it to friends (see
Marshall Jon Fisher's
piece in The Atlantic
if you think I exaggerate). In fact, I'll let Fisher, whose parents
knew Willeford, describe it himself:
"I remember him roaring with laughter while telling my parents
about the opening scene of his novel-in-progress, which would become
Miami
Blues.
In it Freddy Frenger, a haiku-writing psychopath, brutally breaks the
finger of a Hare Krishna in the Miami airport. Frenger goes on his
merry way, and the Krishna collapses in shock--and dies."

Miami
Blues
doesn't have much of a plot, and it includes the kind of
coincidences critics sniff at writers for, calling the unrealistic
events deus
ex machina. Well,bon
golly molly!
Willeford,
who won the Silver Star in WWII, gave a couple of nostrils full of
industrial grade ammonia to any critics who wished to sniff at the
big fat deus
ex machina he
stuckright
in chapter one:
The
19-year-old hooker Freddy Frenger hooks up with at the hotel, where
he’s staying under a fake name is, unbeknownst to him, the dead
Hare Krishna’s sister.

And
Willeford follows this up with another, an even more outrageous deus
ex machina, giving
sniffing critics
a one-two punch combo (he did some boxing, too), when he brings
series star Moseley together with the doomed (we know) young couple
driving them to the morgue so the hooker can identify her brother. In
the car Moseley’s cop instincts immediately pick up that Frenger’s
hinky, but as he’s only investigating the Hare Krishna’s death he
merely files this away for possible future reference. Neither Moseley
nor Susie Waggoner, the hooker, know Frenger’s the one who broke
the finger. You must believe me that altho this sounds like a blazing
satire, Willeford delivers the humor so slyly, so nonchalantly,
you’re apt to ease along with it, laughing to yourself while
seriously hooked on wondering what the hell the next page will
reveal. I did, anyway.

One more laugh and then I’ll move along to something else. Susie’s an
inexperienced, barely competent hooker who came to Miami from
Okeechobee with her brother to abort the baby he’d impregnated her
with. They decided to stay in Miami—brother hustling Hare Krishna
at the airport, Susie hooking at the hotel, to earn enuf money to buy
a Burger King franchise. Frenger “rescues” Susie from her job and
takes her to another hotel. He tells her they’re married
“platonically,” which she seems to understand, altho what Frenger
really means is that they’re shacking up, which she accepts without
question. He’s the nicest man she’s ever known, she tells him,
and evidently means it.

While
Susie keeps house Frenger’s at the mall mugging drug dealers and
pickpockets, and Detective Moseley returns to his daily life, which
amounts to paying half his sergeant’s salary to his ex, and living
free in a Miami Beach fleabag hotel where he earns his keep doing
minimal security work. Things heat up when Frenger, who somehow gets
Moseley’s address, mugs him in his hotel room, beating him badly
and stealing his gun, his badge, and his blackjack.

Moseley
wakes up in a hospital with no idea who attacked him. The narrative
here becomes so realistic--focusing on the injuries, the treatments,
the hospital expenses, the problems his department has muting the
embarrassment of a cop losing his badge and gun, the fact that he’s
been living illegally out of his jurisdiction—that, even tho I
hadn’t thought I’d gotten to know Hoke much yet, I cared about
all of this, as if he were a friend or relative.

When
the narrative shifts to Frenger’s problems, his viewpoints, his
predicaments, I feel as as if he’s the brother who went bad, but is
still a brother. Willeford’s writing incrementally creeps into your
sensibility (mine, anyway), making it hard not to identify with which
ever viewpoint is at bat. And there are believable parallels—each
is even struggling to quit smoking. We know they’ll inevitably meet
again, and it won’t be friendly.

As
the showdown approaches, we’re in Moseley’s head, filled with the
need to avenge himself as well as bring a criminal to justice. He’s
ambivalent about the meeting. “The
more he thought about [Frenger], the more afraid he was,” he tells
himself. “This was not paranoia. When a man has beaten you badly
and you know that he can do it to you again, a wholesome fear is a
sign of intelligence...his only chance was to spot him in the street,
and that seemed damned unlikely. Deep down, way down there in the pit
of his stomach, he hoped he wouldn’t find him”

He’s
still musing when he finally does:
“Freddy
Frenger, Jr., AKA Ramon Mendez, had played out the game to the end
and didn’t really mind losing his life in a last-ditch attempt to
win. Junior would have been good at checkers or chess, thought Hoke,
where sometimes a poor player can beat a much better one if he is
aggressive and stays boldly on the attack. That was Junior, all
right, and if you turned your head away from the board for an
instant, to light a cigarette or to take a sip of coffee, he would
steal one of your pieces. Junior didn’t have to play by the rules,
but Hoke did.”

Well.
We know who won, else there wouldn’t be three more published Hoke
Moseley novels and another one available in
typescript available for reading only in the Charles Willeford
Archive at the Broward County Library.

Oh,
I must not omit the last laugh, on the last page, an item in The
Okeechobee Bi-Weekly News:

OCALA—Mrs.
Frank Mansfield, formerly Ms. Susan Waggoner, of Okeechobee, won the
Tri-County Bake-Off in Ocala yesterday with her vinegar pie entry.
The recipe for her winning entry is as follows:

I
thought it was a joke, as I’d never heard of nor could imagine
vinegar pie. I Googled it. It’s real, it’s Southern, and it sounds right tasty.The recipe's the last thing in the book!

Sunday, February 17, 2019

Wanna get
lit hip quick? Don't look to me to get you there. You gotta have a
New York City connection, and I've been there only twice: once
spending a night on a friend's sailboat, and the other in a friend's
4th
floor Manhattan apartment after being trapped in an elevator for a
millennium and next morning
finding my car, parked on the street below, had been broken into.
Something evidently frightened the thief off, as he or she left his
or her tire iron under the hood. It was my only souvenir from
that trip—the rusty tire iron—and I kept it for years under the
front seat of every vehicle I've
owned since then. Probly somewhere in my Ford Ranger Sport model
pickup as I type this guide to the guide to getting lit hip quick,It
is
the Apex of Our
Culture: "Have you read Gravity’s Rainbow?"

To answer the Apex
question, yes, I've read Gravity's Rainbow, but only after two
or three false starts, always giving up at the advent of the giant
walking adenoid, thinking at that point I might be losing my mind. I
finally decided I had to read the damned thing all the way through if
I ever wanted to at least be able to talk lit hip, so I did (and, in
doing so, very possibly did lose at least part of my mind—but also
gained a new respect, bordering on awe, for adenoids, mine, and, in
fact, everyone's). It was the same year I finally read Moby Dick
after two or three false starts, spaced about a decade apart. Reading
Moby Dick did nothing to advance me toward lit hipness, but I
do know a lot more now about whales, presented in vaguely King
Jamesian biblical dialect that occasionally soared so majestically I
could almost hear Gregory Peck's maddened voice wailing over
the waves, and the stomping around on his God damned peg leg.

Kinmonth

I should note—by God I do
note!—I was given entré
to the coveted lit status
by prominent New York City photographer Rob Kinmonth, who’d
recommended Gravity’s
Rainbow to me when
we were colleagues in Newport News, Va. at his hometown newspaper. Or
maybe it was V
he recommended. I started that, too, and pooped out before the end
for fear of losing my mind without even the goading of a superhuman
adenoid. Or maybe it was just Pynchon Rob recommended. Both V
and GR
are giant novels, which might also have
played a deniable role
in my half-hearted early attempts (I never have gotten to the end of
V,
altho I’ve started it several times.). The one I finished first was
the novella, The
Crying of Lot 49,
which, finally, blew my mind all over the seat on the train from
Newport News to
Philadelphia and back
reading
the thing and learning
therein to live equanimically with my latent paranoia and propensity
to explode with laughter at word combinations plumbing nuances I
never could have explained to anyone—not even a lit hipster—nor
could I now. Problem is, McGrouchpants, in his guide to lit
hip in
one stoned sitting, pays so little notice to Crying
I’d be begging for
ridicule trying to claim points toward a lit hip degree for having
read it, and maybe’d even lose points for admitting how
cataclysmically it affected me. But, as McGrouchpants or Pynchon
might put it, so f**king be it (the asterisks are in deference to
Prudence, Amazon’s language sensory/censoring bot, which would reject
without dispensation the entire review were it to spot certain
verboten letter combinations from its tight-assed data base--even if contained in an excerpt from the work being reviewed!). As
Hemingway or some other pre-hip lit lion once said, the asterisk is
the dirtiest word in fiction (we presume with hope the bot does not
know this).

Grouchy

If it's slipped my mind to point out that
McGrouchpants’s quicky guide to Lit Hip (I’m upper casing it as
by now we should know this is something important and should be
treated as such) is brief, it is. So brief it’s considered in the academic
sense a “monograph,” meaning, I’m guessing, it’s shorter than
a thesis, and this, mainly, because it omits voluminous footnoting,
tedious repetition, ass-kissing acknowledgments, and, of course, the
mandatory, drawn-out passive voice. In the spirit, thus, of brevity I
forthwith am adopting a shortened version of the author’s presumed
pseudonym. I’ve known him nearly a decade now as a fellow
contributor to Fictionaut.com, where I initially eoncountered him as
“Smiley McGrouchpants.” Somewhere along the way, I’m thinking
possibly around the end of 2016, the “Smiley” morphed into
“Crabby.” But in keeping with the conceit of this “monograph,”
I am reluctant to stray too far from formality. Yet, in deference to
my fingers’ beseechment of me to ease up on the
upper-case-lower-case pseudo-surname rhumba, I’m reducing the
combination of letters to simply “Grouchy,” the identical
appellation redaction I’ve adopted for our primary venue.

Grouchy's self-perception

Lest any readers of this
review think for so much as a blink I am trying by this
ridiculous-seeming syntax to pass myself off as a graduate of the New
York Amalgamated Academy of Lit Hip Research Ltd., please perish the
notion! Not exactly sure just what it is that’s come over me, altho
those readers with an understanding of the expression “contact
high” might find a clue in the following paragraph, lifted verbatim
in its entirety from the aforementioned monograph:

“But what if . . . ”
(taking
another toke here),
“the mind, the imagination properly speaking, couldn’t, like a—”
(toooke) “— hot air balloon, be reigned in, and—” (tooohhke)
“— started floating, helpless, into the ‘murder’ regions of
the mind, irretrievably ‘corrupted’ by the cre-ah—” (toohke)
“— tive parts of the mind—” (grabs pen, attempts to pull of
cap, gets it on the second try, starts scribbling furiously . . . )”

Are
you with me here? Don’t worry if you’re not. Not sure I’m here
myself. But I’d like to be, which is why I read Grouchy’s
monograph thinking I was on the cusp of Lit Hip for having read
several works by Pynchon but soon realizing I’d have to read it
again, and perhaps again after that, and so forth, as Grouchy says he
did with all 780 pages
of the 26-year-old Pynchon’s Gravity’s
Rainbow. At
least three times, maybe four, depending on which of his paragraphs
you believe. Grouchy’s monograph alone was beginning to stagger me
until I got to the paragraph where he notes that Gravity’s
Rainbow has a
similar effect, possibly intimidating many as esoteric gibberish
“rather than a
rollicking, improv.-based Warner Brothers cartoon that makes WWII
look like it was run by people who at least thought they should try
to intimidate Cary Grant’s élan . . . crossed with Dr. Strangelove
. . .”

Grouchy with anonymous celebrity

I get that, but I’ll be
damned if I read Gravity’s Rainbow another two or three
times just to make sure. I have the diligence only to re-read parts
of this monograph for the review, certainly not to master its
hip-lit/film maze as presented without footnotes by Grouchy
McCrabpants, who obviously gets it with enough confidence to put his
assertions right out there in the Kindle universe for dilettantes
like me to fumble around with as if we get it, too. Some of the names
he drops I recognize and some I’ve read or seen their work on a
screen. Only one grabbed me by the throat with such shocking tenacity
I actually rushed back to the Kindle library and downloaded his most
recent (I think) book:Walkaway,
by Cory Doctorow, whom I’d not known of. Here’s the quote that
snagged me: “The universe hates us. We are temporary
violations of the second law of thermodynamics. We push entropy off
to the edges, but it’s patient, and it builds, and when we take our
eyes off of it, kerbloom, it’s back with a vengeance.”

Walkaway’s a long
book, too, so I figure I'll read it a couple three times and have
met the requirements for at least an associate degree in Lit Hip. I
know you’re pulling for me!

Pynchon

Oh, this: Pynchon,
remember, was 26 when he “scribbled” Gravity’s Rainbow out on
engineers’ quadrille paper (the kind with little squares on
it--this fact alone nudges me fearfully close to clinical insanity).
Today, Wiki says, the dude is 81.

Thursday, February 14, 2019

Now
that I’ve just read In
Search of Murder--the
thirty-seventh and final episode in the Inspector Alvarez series--I’m
pretty sure that if author Roderic Jeffries were asked which if any
contemporary novelists influenced his writing he’d be lying if he
didn’t include Joseph Heller. In fact he’d be lying outrageously
if he didn’t admit to channeling great gobs of Heller’s
best-known work, Catch-22.
The
prosecution hereby presents exhibit A.

From
Catch-22:

“Metcalf,
is that your foot I’m stepping on?”

“No,
sir. It must be Lieutenant Scheisskopf’s foot.”

“It
isn’t my foot,” said Lieutenant Scheisskopf.

“Then
maybe it is my foot after all,” said Major Metcalf.

“Move
it.”

“Yes,
sir. You’ll have to move your foot first, colonel. It’s on top of
mine.”

“Are
you telling me to move my foot?”

“No,
sir. Oh, no, sir.”

From In
Search of Murder:

‘You have
questioned the cook to confirm Señora Metcalfe’s evidence?’

‘No,
señor, because—’

‘The need
to do so has not occurred to you?’

‘If Señor
Metcalfe was physically incapable of dragging Picare under the water
sufficiently quickly and forcefully—’

‘Was he?’

‘Obviously.’

‘You
readily and without question accept the obvious? You will get into a
swimming pool and, with help, determine whether with only one arm, a
man can be dragged under water with force and speed.

Even the
name Metcalf(e) appears in both excerpts. The one from Jeffries’s
novel is an example of Inspector Alvarez’s constant telephone
conversations with his superior, Superior Chief Salas, who, although
never leaving his office in Palma, micromanages every step of
Alvarez’s attempts to investigate murder cases in his remote
jurisdiction. These ridiculous exchanges are amusing at first, but
soon become so tiresome I find myself speeding past them with barely
a glance. It was the same in the first four episodes, and seems
exaggerated in this final outing. And in this one similar sarcastic
exchanges take place with virtually everyone Alvarez comes in contact
with—almost as if Heller wrote the scenes and simply changed the
names.

Here’s
one more exchange between Alvarez and Salas, who had been out when
Alvarez tried to reach him as requested:

He identified himself.

‘Your
reason for calling now?’

‘Because
you weren’t there, señor.’

‘Where?’

‘Where
you are.’

‘Are
you drunk?’

‘I
would never consider touching liquor when on duty, señor.’

‘Then
you are unaware that the purpose of speech is to communicate.’

‘I
thought you would understand that when I said where you are, that
meant where you would have been, had you been there.’

‘You
will not pursue the matter into total chaos. You will explain in the
simplest possible manner why you are phoning me now.’

Here he’s
trying to interview a woman who might know something about the murder
of a wealthy, womanizing Englishman found drowned in his swimming
pool:

‘What
d’you want?’ she asked.

‘I’ll
tell you if no one else is listening.’

‘You’re
full of hopeless optimism for a man who won’t see fifty again.’

‘I’m
still in my early thirties.’

‘And you
believe in fairies.’ …

‘I should
like to talk to Marta …’ he began.

‘She
cannot speak to you,’ she replied sharply.

‘I know
she’s very unhappy.’

‘And yet
you think to disturb her further?’

‘I fear I
have to.’

‘You
consider yourself of greater authority than her mother?’

Yes.
Tedious. I fully expected, this being the series finale, that Alvarez
would throw up his hands at the end and take early retirement. I’ll
refrain from any hint of a spoiler other than to say there will be no
more episodes. At least not written by Jeffries, who is listed as 92
in his Wikipedia bio. And I doubt I would read any by any other
writer who might pick up the Alvarez baton. For one, only someone who
lives on the quaint Balearic island of Mallorca could do justice to
its culture and atmosphere, as has Jeffries, who apparently has lived
there most of his adult life. Plus, by now so many of the English
transplants there have either been murdered or fled to avoid
prosecution for murder that the pickings for new plots must be
petering out.

If I
haven’t mentioned it, all of the victims in the five episodes I’ve
read have been English transplants, and much of the novels’
dialogue is spiteful gossip among them. Alvarez, while baffled by the
English arrogance and loose morals, by Mallorquin standards, is
always polite and good humored, a sort of rustic Hispanic Lt.
Colombo, who never passes up a glass of cognac or wine unless to make
a point—which is rare—and loves Mallorquin cuisine and, although
middle aged, overweight, and out of shape, enjoys ogling women and
describyng their charms to us in delighted detail.

Just had a
thought here. I would
read a sequel to the series, no matter who wrote it, if I had even
the tiniest hint Superior Chief Salas would finally get his
comeuppance. If only because no matter how seemingly indifferent his
subordinate seems to be to investigating any
crime in his jurisdiction he always eventually gets his murderer.
He’s a one-man Spanish equivalent of the Royal Canadian Mounted
Police.

Thursday, February 7, 2019

I
didn't learn until two days ago, six decades after watching the movie
adaptation of Anatomy
of a Murderwith
my parents, that "Robert Traver" based his novel on a real
murder case and that he had been the defense attorney in that case. I
vaguely recall comments to that effect by my lawyer father. If so
he'd have gotten it from newspaper accounts, as there's no mention of
it in the movie or in the novel. My memory on this is cautious
because I also believed my father had said the author, whose real
name was John D. Voelker, a Michigan Supreme Court Justice when he
wrote the novel, had played the judge in the movie.

'Tweren't so. The
man playing the judge was vastly more important historically than a
hundred Judge Voelkers or even a hundred Jimmy Stewarts, the actor
who brilliantly portrayed Voelker's real-life trial role in the
movie. I sit chagrined now by this flawed memory, as Dad, who spent
the years I knew him deriding "McCarthyism" whenever he saw
so much as a hair from its ugly head, would never have mistaken a
mere state supreme court justice for Joseph N. Welch, the Boston
attorney who five years earlier called the Wisconsin demagogue's
bluff in the Army-McCarthy hearings with this single line, which I do
remember hearing live on the radio at the time but without remotely
comprehending its thunderous significance:
"Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?"

Although
I’ve thought of that movie often over the years, I never read the
book—until last week. It’s a long’n at 437 pages, yet, despite
length and wordiness, it pulled me through with a relentless force.
As is often the case for me, voice has a lot to do with how I take to
a novel. With Anatomy
of a Murder I
found myself astounded by the unmistakable, ingenuous, unashamedly
corny voice of Jimmy Stewart! Want a sample? Here’s the novel’s
narrator, Paul Biegler, lamenting the loss of his job as county
prosecutor to a young Korean War veteran (Biegler was 4F), and
wondering what he should do with the rest of his life:
“For
a spell I even dabbled with the heady notion of organizing a sort of
American legion of 4F’s. We’d have an annual convention and
boyishly tip over buses and streetcars and get ourselves a national
commander who could bray in high C and sound off on everything under
the sun; we’d even get a lobby in Washington and wave the Flag and
praise the Lord and damn the United Nations and periodically swarm
out like locusts selling crepe-paper flowers or raffle tickets or
some damned thing, just like all the other outfits.”

J-J-James
Shtowert, no? Anyway, I heard him in there, all the way. It was
Stewart I remembered most from movie, notwithstanding Lee Remick’s
skintightslitherings
and come hitherings and enrapturing smile and eyes and...things. And
the scene I remembered most fondly, and which almost seduced me into
taking up trout fishing and smoking Italian cheroots, was the opening
scene:
Duke Ellington’s saucy jazz riffs accompanying a tiny convertible
in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula zipping along a winding road until
the car’s in front of us and we see it’s Stewart driving and it’s
early morning and he slows down through the little town and waves and
speaks to a shopkeeper and finally arrives home and stashes his
freshly caught trout in the fridge with several dozen other trout,
each wrapped in newspaper, stows his fishing gear in a sort of
hallway/closet and then…

I’ve
played that scene in my mind over and over again over the decades,
and it always faded out with me playing the Jimmy Stewart part. But I
never studied law or learned to fish with a fly. But last week, for
no particular reason save perhaps some sort of irresistible impulse,
I bought the DVD and played the movie once again. Alas, to my
heartsick disappointment the opening had shrunk over the years. The
convertible now is already entering the town instead of winding along
through the countryside—a scene I’m now thinking was in the
theatrical version I saw but was cut in later editions to pare down
the time of this still quite long—about two hours—fictional
dramatization of a real trial that successfully tested a 19th
century Michigan Supreme Court ruling that affirmed
the concept of dissociative reaction, aka “irresistible impulse,”
as a legitimate insanity defense. It established Michigan as one of
only a few states to recognize this defense as valid, legally
exonerating someone who, whether or not able to distinguish between
right and wrong at the time, simply cannot resist committing the
crime.

Both
cases—the real and the fictitious—involved a military man
shooting to death the proprietor of an inn after the proprietor raped
the soldier’s wife. Both defendants were tried by jury, and both
juries rendered the same verdict. The two main difficulties Anatomy’s
defense face are to convince the jury that the victim did in fact
rape the defendant’s wife and that her husband was in such a mental
state after seeing what had happened to her that he marched straight
from the couple’s trailer to the inn and emptied his war trophy
German Lüger
into the rapist. Complicating both requirements are the stunning
beauty of the wife and the jealous nature of her soldier husband,
both of which could be seen in the couple’s courtroom demeanor. In
the movie, the wife, played by Lee Remick, made this more difficult
for her husband by flaunting her flirtatiousness around the small
town where the trial was being held. The wife is more restrained in
the novel, but still comes across as strikingly attractive. Here’s
Biegler, her husband’s, lawyer, describing his reaction to meeting
her:

“I
caught my breath. Her eyes were large and a sort of luminous aquarium
green. Looking into them was like peering into the depths of the sea.
I had never seen anything quite like them before and I was beginning,
however dimly, to understand a little what it was that might have
driven Barney Quill off his rocker. The woman was breathtakingly
attractive, disturbingly so, in a sort of vibrant electric way. Her
femaleness was blatant to the point of flamboyance; there was
something steamily tropical about her; she was, there was no other
word for it, shockingly desirable.”

Yet,
more engrossing than the drama these primal dynamics bring to
Anatomy,
the novel takes us into a world seldom seen in such depth and
intimacy by the average citizen, that of trial by jury. Even Biegler
is amazed to realize in the heat of this courtroom battle the
contest’s ultimate vitality. “A
grim thought suddenly assailed me,” he tells us. “Though I had
never held many illusions to the contrary, I was now struck solidly
in the gut with the notion of what a snarling jungle a trial really
was; with the fact that despite all the obeisant “Your honors”
and “may it please the courts,” despite all the rules and
objections and soft illusion of decorum, a trial was after all a
savage and primitive battle for survival itself.”

Of
Biegler’s love for this high-stakes arena there is no doubt. He
compares the practice
of law with prostitution, “one of the last of the unpredictable
professions—both employ the seductive arts, both try to display
their wares to the best advantage, and both must pretend
enthusiastically to woo total strangers.”

And
of a murder trial? “A lawyer caught in the toils of a murder case
is like a man newly fallen in love:
his involvement is total. All he can think about, talk about, brood
about, dream about, is his case, his lovely lousy goddam case.
Whether fishing, shaving, even lying up with a dame, it is always
there, the pulsing eternal insistent thump thump of his case. Alas,
it is true: the lover in love and the lawyer in murder share equally
one of the most exquisite, baffling, delightful, frustrating,
exhilarating, fatiguing, intriguing experiences known to man.” A
lot like writing a novel, author Voelker might have added.

As
to the movie’s opening scene...the one I’d held in my memory
since 1959 of the aerial view of the convertible flying along the
winding road, and the saucy jazz, I began to wonder if maybe my
imagination had gotten involved a tad too much in there. If so, I’d
have to admit to being an unreliable witness, and would be wary of
inflicting my memory on anyone who might find his or her life or
freedom on trial by a jury. I figured if the scene had been cut in
the DVD version I watched two days ago maybe I’d find it in the
book. And were that so, I would be exonerated. Sadly, this was not to
be. Here’s the opening, wonderful as it is, but not what I needed
to restore my confidence. If you have a Duke Ellington CD handy, for
Pete’s sake (as Jimmy might have put it) put it on:

Otto Preminger and John D. "Robert Traver" Voelker

“The
mine whistles were tooting midnight as I drove down Main Street hill.
It was a warm moonlit Sunday night in mid-August and I was arriving
home from a long weekend of trout fishing in the Oxbow Lake district
with my old hermit friend Danny McGinnis, who lives there all year
round. I swung over on Hematite Street to look at my mother’s
house— the same gaunt white frame house on the corner where I was
born. As my car turned the corner the headlights swept the rows of
tall drooping elms planted by my father when he was a young man—
much younger than I— and gleamed bluely on the darkened windows. My
mother Belle was still away visiting my married sister and she had
enjoined me to keep an eye on the place. Well, I had looked and lo!
like the flag, the old house was still there.

“I
swung around downtown and slowed down to miss a solitary drunk
emerging blindly from the Tripoli Bar and out upon the street, in a
sort of gangling somnambulistic trot, pursued on his way by the
hollow roar of a juke box from the garishly lit and empty bar.
“Sunstroke,” I murmured absently. “Simply a crazed victim of
the midnight sun.” As I parked my mud-spattered coupe alongside the
Miners’ State Bank, across from my office over the dime store, I
reflected that there were few more forlorn and lonely sounds in the
world than the midnight wail of a juke box in a deserted small town,
those raucous proclamations of joy and fun where, instead, there
dwelt only fatigue and hangover and boredom. To me the wavering hoot
of an owl sounds utterly gay by comparison.

“I
unlocked the car trunk and took out my packsack and two
aluminum-cased fly rods and a handbag and rested them on the curb. I
shouldered the packsack and grabbed up the other stuff and started
across the echoing empty street.”